The following is an American story that is worth narrating, although I fear that some important details might be omitted, as I am summarizing it to fit in this column. Near the beginning of this month, Laura Rozen from the Politico website cited an anonymous source in the Obama administration who said that Dennis Ross, one of the U.S officials involved in the Middle East peace process under four U.S administrations, "seems to be far more sensitive to Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition politics than to U.S. interests." Of course, this is true and widely known, and I had written about it time after time and described Jewish officials involved in the peace process in the Clinton administration to be the rabbis of the State Department. In fact, I was specifically talking about four of them, who are: Ross, Martin Indyk, Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron Miller. In fact, I saw the latter at an economic conference in Casablanca, while I was accompanied by Sheikh Mohammed Al Mubarak, the Deputy Prime Minister of Bahrain and the foreign minister at the time. He protested against my use of the word ‘rabbi', and said that I was attacking them, because of their religion. I decided to stop using that term, because I did not mean any offence, and just wanted to emphasize their allegiance to Israel, and also because the four concerned differ from one another: while the most pro-Israeli officials were Ross and Indyk, the fairest and most diligent in working for U.S interests were Kurtzer and Miller. At any rate, the news story published in Politico caught the attention of Professor Stephen Walt, who co-authored the book entitled “The Israel Lobby” along with Professor John Mearsheimer. This was enough for Walt to write a commentary on the story in the “Foreign Policy” magazine. Walt said that the accusation raised the spectre of ‘dual loyalty', as those who criticized Ross accused him of having dual loyalty, while those who defended him accused his critics of being anti-Semitic. Walt added that the accusation of "dual loyalty" has a bad history, since it was used in old Europe, when anti-Semitism was prevalent. However, the term recently got an analytical and neutral explanation, based on the fact that human nature is inclined to having multiple loyalties. According to a 2006 Pew survey of Christians in thirteen countries, 42 percent of U.S. Christians considered themselves "as Christians first and then as Americans." (This is similar to what we know about our own countries, where most citizens consider themselves Muslim first, and then Egyptian, Saudi or Moroccan.) Walt also referred to Gabriel Sheffer's book, “Diaspora Politics,” which distinguishes between total, dual, and divided loyalties, and then spoke about the inevitability of having different attachments to other countries that reflect ancestry, religious affiliation or personal experience in the melting pot that is the United States, and of certain Americans working in areas where their countries have essential interests. Walt suggested that instead of the term ‘dual loyalty', the phrase to be used in describing those Americans should be ‘conflicts of interest'. He specifically criticized the fact that officials in AIPAC or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy can work as Middle East experts in the U.S administration, although they have a strong attachment to one specific country in the region (Israel). These last words, in particular, angered Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute, prompting him to respond to Walt with protests and opposing viewpoints to what the latter wrote, while defending the institute and its mission. I speak for myself when I say that the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is yet another Israel lobby in the United States. It was founded by Martin Indyk, using funds of pro-Israeli American Jews who wanted another lobby that is subtler than AIPAC, knowing that there is a great deal of controversy about its officials that have a single, and not dual, loyalty. Some of these officials were even indicted for spying on their country for Israel. My objection to the term is that ‘dual loyalty' hints at supporting two countries, while Likudnik Americans support Israel alone and often at the expense of their own country. Satloff himself is an obvious advocate of Israel; however, he is much better than the other parties he is defending. He is fair in many other issues, and his book ‘Arab Heroes of the Holocaust' emphasized the role of North African Arabs in protecting the Jews in their midst, and that the latter did not end up being sent to Nazi gas chambers as a result. Ultimately, only one percent of North African Jews were killed in the Second World War, compared to fifty percent of the Jews in Europe. This feature in Satloff himself, however, does not negate the fact that the Washington Institute includes researchers that work for Israel alone; whether some of the latter worked for 35 years in the Defence Intelligence Agency, or 30 years in the State Department, they nonetheless always put the interests of Israel first, and cause adversity among the region's peoples against the United States. In fact, I have personally seen how we all changed our stances regarding the freedoms, democracy and human rights in the United States, to complete adversity, following its full support for an occupation fascist state that murders women and children. However, I am ultimately with one team against another. Hence, I shall continue tomorrow with Walt's response to Satloff's reaction, a response that is powerful and written by a prominent American professor, not an Arab journalist. [email protected]
